The advent of tablet-type touch screen computing devices has also given rise to the use of specialized brushes which, in conjunction with the proper software, allow users to effectively “paint” on the tablet's screen. More specifically, these brushes are designed to be conductive, so that contact with the touch screen signals a touch to the tablet. The conductive brush thus acts similar to a human finger, triggering a touch and allowing users to paint, or apply digital color patterns to, any desired area of the screen, with the added benefit that the application of color or other patterns can be done as a conventional brush would apply paint. This allows users to produce digital “paintings” that can have the look and varied textures of brush strokes, with the added benefit that the resulting works are electronic documents that can be easily and almost arbitrarily stored or modified, unlike paint on an easel.
Conventional conductive brushes, sometimes also referred to as styluses, are often designed similar to a standard paint brush, except that the fibers of the brush head, as well as the handle, are conductive. U.S. Pat. No. 5,488,204 to Mead et al. provides one such example. These brushes, however, suffer from certain drawbacks. For example, the brushes use no actual paint, and therefore have no medium that can act to hold their fibers together during painting. The fibers thus tend to splay apart excessively, diminishing the electrical conductivity of the brush and thus losing detection by the tablet, as well as possibly producing undesired visual effects on the digital canvas. Ongoing efforts thus exist to improve the performance of conductive brushes.